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tsu doh nimh (609154) writes "A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls — including bomb threats and 'swattings' — to emergency services across North America over the past few months. Canadian media isn't identifying the youth because of laws that prevent the disclosure, but the alleged perpetrator was outed in a dox on Pastebin that was picked up by journalist Brian Krebs, who was twice the recipient of attempted swat raids at the hand of this kid. From the story: 'I told this user privately that targeting an investigative reporter maybe wasn't the brightest idea, and that he was likely to wind up in jail soon. But @ProbablyOnion was on a roll: That same day, he hung out his for-hire sign on Twitter, with the following message: "want someone swatted? Tweet me their name, address and I'll make it happen."'"

If you think the poor and ignorant cause harm, you should see what the wealthy and powerful do. Coming from Old Money (great-grandparent a wealthy business owner and profligate gambler, grandparent a member of all the right/wrong clubs, parents in senior civil service, £30k/year private school, &c.), I was surrounded by destructive idiots with obscene wealth who were there on anything but their own merits.

I'm all in favour of personal responsibility, but that means considering the complete chain and gamut of consequences of your actions, not merely what flows immediately from your behaviour. Those who use a snapshot of any complex system to derive a solution do a disservice to their brain.

The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the SWAT team pounds down their door are about 2-4%. The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the police don't SWAT their door is much lower. Therefore, SWATting someone is equivalent to a 2-4% attempt of a murder.

At the minimum, that could be prosecuted as a felonious assault with intent to cause grievous bodily injury. Since some of the people who die in SWAT raids are occasionally the cops, this could even be considered an assault on a police officer.

A good prosecutor could stuff this little turd in a very dark cell for a couple of decades, and the world would be much better off as a result.

why he needs to be tried on trial as an adult when he is not an adult? he got to vote and buy booze yet? no, then why treat him as an adult - to scare others who by law and common reason aren't yet intelligent enough to be scared by such laws anyways??

anyhow, HOW FUCKING EASY WAS IT TO ORDER A SWAT HIT ? ? they did any fact checking before bursting in? any investigations? did they even fucking change their routines to prevent people from ordering swat hits on random places at will??? like what the fuck, easier to order a bunch of guys to come over with loaded guns than to order pizza?

anyhow, HOW FUCKING EASY WAS IT TO ORDER A SWAT HIT ? ? they did any fact checking before bursting in? any investigations? did they even fucking change their routines to prevent people from ordering swat hits on random places at will??? like what the fuck, easier to order a bunch of guys to come over with loaded guns than to order pizza?

The militarization of police forces is making criminals of us all. Think you have the right to be secure in your home? Think again.

Just recently I saw a massive police overreaction (closing off a block of downtown DC in front of a university hospital, complete with police abusing citizens) just because some student left her backpack lying around. If this is all it takes to provoke this sort of reaction, and if a few phone calls can get someone "swatted", then why the hell does al-Qaeda bother with bombings and flying planes into things? Send over a few sleeper cells with nondescript bags and boxes and watch the panic fly.

This is pretty damn analogous to an allergic reaction: "ack, a piece of peanut antigen! FETCH ALL THE CYTOKINES, BOYS, THIS MEANS WAR!"

You do realize that these Swatting are caused by someone with the fake caller ID of the address calling emergency services and claiming there home has been invaded by someone with guns and they are actively killing people and have numerous hostages. Or some other variant where someone with a gun is in the process of killing someone with a bunch lined up and the caller is either a hidden victim or the person doing the active killing. There is usually included a statement that the cops need to hurry and that any attempt at contact will result in the "killer" immediately killing multiple people.

The scenario presented doesn't give police many options. Though I don't like SWAT teams nor the militarization of the police, but reacting to these scenarios as if it was a prank is only going to result in a real scenario going bad in a way that results in multiple people being killed and everyone laying blame on the cops for not taking it seriously.

Maybe you should read the transcript of these SWAT'ings and lay out what procedure you would have put in place to determine that it was a prank and not the real thing and prove how smart you are. Keep in mind that in some jurisdictions there may be laws on the books that require this type of response.

So the solution is for the police to react calmly, professionally using their presumably expert knowledge with a little bit of common sense. They should be able to suss out these swattings and act appropriately in the vast majority of cases. Breaking down doors and shooting innocents should be an incredible rarity.

So the solution is for the police to react calmly, professionally using their presumably expert knowledge with a little bit of common sense. They should be able to suss out these swattings and act appropriately in the vast majority of cases.

Why "should" they be able to suss out these swattings? What symptoms are the police missing that differentiates a swatting from a real incident? I.E. the same questions the grandparent asked, but that you airily handwaved away.

Unless you can answer them, you're blaming the cops based on a belief you've pulled out of your ass rather than anything resembling reality.

It's absolutely unacceptable for a telco to report a false number to emergency services, ever. I don't care if a company wants their corporate number on the caller ID for all their calls -- if someone calls 911 from a corporate phone, it needs to have the correct number, name, and address. Same for call forwarding -- when I'm calling 911 and need the EMTs or police here NOW, they better see the number I'm actually calling from, not the one which I normally prefer to display to the world.

yeah, horrible phone companies, allowing a company to put their corporate number for the caller ID for all calls.

Fine if they put whatever they want in the 'caller id' that is transmitted inband at the start of the call;
they should NOT be allowed to use a custom ANI; the ANI number which is used for long distance billing should be unique to the line and should be the number that calls into that line.

The police ought to be provided access to and use the more reliable ANI Billing number (Automatic Number Identification), instead of the relying upon the possibly user-spoofable Caller ID.

Mine doesn't. Its fairly easy to setup your mail server to only accept mail from properly configured mail servers, in which case you can ensure the message came from a server that should be responsible for sending you a message from that address.

Nice idea, but fails in practice if used in a commercial setting where each rejected email may be a lost sale.

The number of our clients or commercial partners who have mail servers that do things like spoof from addresses is quite alot. If they use things like online hosted accounting software, hosted CRM systems and other similar stuff it often spoofs the person who is sending you the messages from address even though the mail server sending it is actually running on the web server that provided the softwa

Mine doesn't. Its fairly easy to setup your mail server to only accept mail from properly configured mail servers, in which case you can ensure the message came from a server that should be responsible for sending you a message from that address.

Most of the time there is absolutely no way to know which mail server is responsible for sending mail for a particular address. People can publish SPF records which provide you with this information, but very few people do, so you can't rely on this.

You can look at the MX records to see which servers can receive mail for that domain, but that doesn't tell you which can send mail, so again you can't rely on this at all.

You can do sender verification callouts, but this only confirms that the address is valid

Spoofing is not necessarily bad, and mail servers are supposed to forward anonymously. I worked in phone systems. It is clearly acceptable to spoof to an alternate line that you own; for example, every phone can have its own DID number, but the caller ID is spoofed to the published/advertised "receptionist" number. Next level out: a contract house doing phone service may be spoofing the receptionist number of the company they are working for rather than their own number; it's fake, but it's not fraud, more like a consultant representing himself as working "for" (rather than "on behalf of") a client. It's a slippery slope.

For the last generation, "Serve and Protect" has become "Cover your ass" and "Everyone is a perp."

But that's exactly the problem - everybody *is* a perp. We have so many laws and every goddamn things has been criminalized, either by statute or regulation, that we'll all felons [amazon.com] now - it's just a matter of who is having the laws enforced against them.

Disabled man shot up for having a seizure? That's OK, he was a perp anyway.

And then when someone calls 911 because of a real hostage situation or bomb threat, then people go all up in arms because SWAT was too slow, never mind that they were only checking if the call was legit.

What's scary is how people always overreact, no matter what, and require blood if the outcome doesn't please them, even if everything was done right otherwise.

However I have limited sympathy.It is like leaving your house unlocked and complain that you always get broken in to.If they don't even bother attempting to stop swattings, then too bad that is their problem.

There is a win, risk analysis based upon reality. Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes. Unless of course the police force has been right wing screwed up and turned into for profit law enforcement, where police are far away chasing traffic fines and some trigger happy freak is all to eager to send and the swat team and kill some people, anyone.

There is huge risk in sending out the swat team, this has been proven time and time again, by far the safer and quicker response is by a properly managed police force and confirmation being sought by 'actively' patrolling police officers. No public call should ever, I repeat ever, activate the swat team, only a request by a senior officer on site should bring the dogs out.

There is huge risk in sending out the swat team, this has been proven time and time again, by far the safer and quicker response is by a properly managed police force and confirmation being sought by 'actively' patrolling police officers. No public call should ever, I repeat ever, activate the swat team, only a request by a senior officer on site should bring the dogs out.

And this appears to be exactly what happened in this case, as the kid is being charged with multiple attempts at swatting only. The attempted calls to the investigative reporter were defused by calls from the local police department. The police appear to have learned their lesson from previous swatting incidents, and no tactical teams were deployed.

Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes.

This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.

Perhaps more importantly even if the cop is careful his nosing around could tip off the hostage-takers, resulting in harm to the hostages. Ideally in a real hostage situation you want the first sign of a swat raid to be the big holes in all the exterior walls.

The problem is that SWAT response usually results in substantial damage to property and risk to the occupants of the house if there isn't anything going on. Pets get killed, doors and windows get smashed, and people sometimes even get shot. Then if the crank call was a drug tip or something like that then everything in the house gets torn apart in the search.

At the very least the taxpayers should be paying restitution for false alarms. By all means they can go after the crank caller to recover those costs. However, by putting the cost on the government and not on the victim of a swatting there is incentive to improve the system, and to deter this kind of prank.

You jest, but I take the failure of ebil al-Qaeda terrists who want to kill or at least scare the fuck out of Americans to kill or scare the fuck out of Americans, combined with how easy it is to do said killing or fuck-scaring, as evidence that they're far less threatening than we're told they are.

Instead we get whackadoodle underpants bombers and wacky Chechens. But the toll from the Boston bombing (5 dead, ~200 injured) is the same as an average week in the ghetto of Baltimore (a city of half a million).

Just recently I saw a massive police overreaction (closing off a block of downtown DC in front of a university hospital, complete with police abusing citizens) just because some student left her backpack lying around. If this is all it takes to provoke this sort of reaction, and if a few phone calls can get someone "swatted", then why the hell does al-Qaeda bother with bombings and flying planes into things? Send over a few sleeper cells with nondescript bags and boxes and watch the panic fly.

If this is all it takes to provoke this sort of reaction, and if a few phone calls can get someone "swatted", then why the hell does al-Qaeda bother with bombings and flying planes into things? Send over a few sleeper cells with nondescript bags and boxes and watch the panic fly.

Because they don't operate like that. Their goal is not to inconvenience Americans, it's to get international attention and power over their own people. The US is just a convenient punching bag. Or do you really think that they are "jealous of our freedoms."

Maybe you missed the Boston Marathon bombings? The police have a choice. They can ignore warnings, suspicious packages, etc, and we can just accept that major cities are going to lose a few thousand people each year. Or they can react to EACH threat. They don't have 20-20 hindsight.

Maybe you missed the Boston Marathon bombings? The police have a choice. They can ignore warnings, suspicious packages, etc, and we can just accept that major cities are going to lose a few thousand people each year. Or they can react to EACH threat. They don't have 20-20 hindsight.

THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?

Maybe I have been sleeping - did I miss the announcements of multiple foiled death plots in North America? I guess the police doing all this type of "targeting suspicious activities" could be acting as a deterrent, but I find it hard to believe that in each of our "major cities" there are people crazy enough to want to plot bombings, but at the same time being held back by their fear of the actions of the police.

SWATting won't end on its own, they want the practice to become more acceptable. This is just practice for ensuring no one ever tries to defeat "national security" which means maintaining the social, economic and political status quo even against the will of the people. What's scariest is how easy "citizens" allow themselves to be fooled into paying for oppressive police states they actu

bombing. The response to this was to have about 3-4 thousand police soldiers(DEA, FBI, staties, and local) show up and shut down about 3 cities here in Massachusetts for a day. I've heard the cost of the shut down was on the order of 300-400 million dollars. Should I point out this was to stop 2 idiots(with little training) with a couple of pressure cooker bombs, some pipe bombs, and a pistol. Wonder what that cost, maybe a thousand dollars? (Geez, if Al-Qaeda wants to hurt us by warfare on the cheap that r

You can thank the end of modem use for that, before it was not unknown... I had the police come out to a hotel once because my modem dialed 911, my wife and I and to talk to them for quite a while before they were convinced all was OK.

If someone calls that there's a hostage situation a long way from the address of payphone (like few states away), one patrol should be enough to assess the situation on-site.

Yeah, but look at it from the standpoint of the guy who runs the police department.

If he sends one cop into a hostage situation, the cop gets shot up, and probably the hostages get shot up. The police chief gets the blame for not taking the call seriously.

If he sends a swat team into a hostage situation he made the right call, and unless he actually runs the swat team he's off the hook for anything that happens afterwards. If there isn't a hostage situation you blame the crank caller for whatever happens, and besides he just followed procedure. Too bad for the poor old guy who gets shot in bed.

The vast majority of the police departments who have SWAT teams shouldn't have them but the militarization of the police is all the rage now. Once your small or medium town has one (or two), you feel compelled to use them as much as possible in order to justify their existence.

... CCTV footage at the time of the call until you get a shot of their face...

Which is why da yout' of today seems to like wearing hooded sweatshirts *with* baseball caps as they walk around the (indoor) mall. Of course, if one reacts with suspicion to someone dressed thusly, one is clearly being prejudiced and/or racist and/or classist, and any attempt at regulation insisting that a face be visible is clearly religious oppression against religions that insist half their population must be invisible.

Why even bother breaking in. Traditional POTS service generally has an easy to break into box on the outside of the house. Let's also not forget that pretty much everyone with home telephone service now uses convenient wireless DECT 6.0 handsets that are also convenentily completely insecure (they have encryption, but it's already been completely broken).

Most of those may obfuscate the caller, but not the source of the call. Calls from a pay phone for instance, will trace to that pay phone, which may or may not be helpful in finding who used the phone to commit the hoax but that phone is still the source of the call. The person to whom I had responded alleged there are "numerous" ways to obfuscate the source of a call.

If you are interested in actually learning more about such techniques I would suggest typing "call spoofing" into your favorite search engine.

There are other technical and non-technical methods that, as you pedantically noted, do not actually hide the source of the call, but render that information unhelpful. Pre-paid "burner" cell phones are an obvious and popular choic

I'm less interested in actually learning about them than I am in understanding where people think that it's necessarily something that there are a plethora of ways that anyone could reasonably be able to accomplish.

Some of the available techniques are trivial, others less so, but there are a number of methods that I would consider reasonable to accomplish. I would consider TRS abuse, VOIP spoofing, and utilizing a spoofing service to be trivial.

I can name more than three. Skype or other IP telephony (gatewayed through public wifi for extra measure), Hacked PBX call redirectors (which are a favorite of many scammers), prepaid cell phone, disposable SIM cards, telephone call anonymizing services [spoofcard.com], public pay phone.

There is a mechanism in the GSM standard for making emergency calls on a network the phone has not authenticated with and i've never heard of a phone not supporting it.

Whether the network actually routes such calls is down to network policies and/or local laws. AIUI in the early days of mobile phones in the the did routed the but they stopped doing so due to a large number of hoax calls from such phones.

911 is not only accessible via standard phone lines and cell/mobile phones. Location tech only has 3 basic methods of locating you. Generally only the first is ever used. Most often however the 911 operator asks, "Where are you right now?"1. Land line billing / install address.2. Mobile phone GPS location. First the police must have authority to activate GPS remotely. Second the phone needs to have GPS. Not all phones do.
2.1 Kind of a third method. Cell tower location that the caller used. This takes a hideous amount of time to determine despite laws that say telcos must provide the capability. So generally not used. And this is horribly inaccurate.3. Geo location of IP address of user. Horribly inaccurate and police forces around the world are very slow to use this tech. Also for example if you have a 3/4G phone your IP address is usually geolocated at the telco company headquarters. This is not generally used for 911 type locations.

Remember the operator only has a few seconds to establish your location during an incident call. They tend to only fall back on location tools when the caller is unable to provide the address them selves. So if the caller says they are at a location then generally that is the accepted location for the incident.

In many jurisdictions around North America and the world for that matter you can place an emergency call via any number of means. You can text, email, tweet skype, use a web form, etc. Note that most of the new forms of emergency notifications come over the internet. Since it is painfully simple these days to make it appear as if you are coming from basically any spot on the globe with internet communications a person can spoof their location with ease.

Note all of this does not mean they can't find the location of the caller. After the incident a wealth of information can be investigated and fairly precise locations can be determined. So don't take what I have said as a open ticket to SWAT. This case proves it's only a matter of time before you get nabbed.

OK, I have worked for 3 letter agencies and emergency responders (after studying EE and then CS in university: serves me right...). Tracking 'Land Lines' is dead simple. If you have a physical telephone, the phone company knows (and not just kinda) your location and phone number, and there is a hard line between the phone company and the emergency responders (and if the line between the phone company and where I was went down an alarm went off and then a guy from the phone company would call me in less th

On one hand, glad the little fucker got caught. on the other, also glad he was Canadian. Had he been in the US, he'd probably get a life sentence.

16 year old kids do really incredibly dumb anti social stuff, problems arise with something as easy to pull off as this -- and the supposed anonymity of the internet. How many of you remember winnuke (circa 1996)? Nowadays nuking someone would have been met with a knock on the door, and being hauled away in cuffs.

(NOT defending swatting. more criticizing penalties for teenagers in the US. At 16 you're a moron -- you have some inkling of the consequences but you don't really *get* it.)

I've never met a 16 year old that didn't understand what they were doing. On the other hand I've met plenty that didn't care. Not even 100 years ago 16 years old was an adult in many places able to exercise contracts, get married and work full time. My grandparents married at 17/16. I don't ascribe to the view that 16 years old is incapable of understanding their actions, that ability develops as early as 5 years old. I do ascribe to the view that our society and most western societies don't hold those 16 year old's to that level and that results in kids like this doing these horrible things.

I also don't think he should face quite the same penalties as an older individual but it's foolish to suggest they don't understand the consequences. Most 16 year olds fully understand, in fact they understand so well that they fully grasp that society will not punish them as harshly because of their age and willfully engage in actions like this because they know there is no long term consequence for their action.

That said he should spend the next two years of his life in a juvenile correctional institution receiving the counseling, assistance and parenting he clearly needs. Afterwards his record should be sealed and he should be told that should he commit these actions again he will end up in real prison.

Afterwards his record should be sealed and he should be told that should he commit these actions again he will end up in real prison.

Where's the justice in that? He needs to be charged with as many Felonies as possible and be made virtually unemployable for the rest of his life, with the hopes this keeps him in poverty and all the more likely to be picked up on trumped-up BS petty charges or resorts to crime, so that we can keep him in the "Correctional System"

I don't know, I think for something like swatting more than ten or so people deserve the full adult felony treatment - because in that case they are an irredeemable asshole and I'd rather them be vanished than spend time figuring out if they are useful to society or not.

Don't have the feudal idea of felons in Canada. In a case like this the Crown might ask for the 16yr old to be tried as an adult and the Judge might agree. Then there is a trial and sentencing rather then the threat of life in jail if the youth doesn't plead guilty. If tried as a juvenile, the maximum is 2 years, which is a good chunk of a 16yr olds life. No idea what the maximum sentence would be if tried as an adult but the Judge would probably still take into consideration his age and history.

It's the cops who are doing dangerous acts if they're kicking in doors with guns a blazing and didn't even do a basic recognizance around the house. If the cops want to play soldier, they should learn basic soldiering.

At 16 you're a moron -- you have some inkling of the consequences but you don't really *get* it.)

Only in the US, where we try to extend "innocence" as long as possible. In a lot of cultures 16 year old are working and starting families. I'm not saying that's the preferred path, just that a 16 year old SHOULD be able to make adult decisions. The fact that they can't means that society is not raising them correctly.

In a lot of cultures 16 year old are working and starting families. I'm not saying that's the preferred path, just that a 16 year old SHOULD be able to make adult decisions. The fact that they can't means that society is not raising them correctly.

No, the biology has been studied for decades. It's actually right around 25 that people emerge from their high-risk behavior and inability to weigh consequences, and start thinking straight. The traffic fatality statistics serve as a good proxy... There's a reason a huge number of 18-25 year-olds are killed in traffic accidents, and it's predominantly biological.

Personally I wish he was in Singapore. This is the kind of thing where corporal punishment would seem appropriate.

In many ways corporal punishment (outside the death penalty and crazy eye for an eye nonsense) would often be cheaper and better for the victim as well. This kid, even if tried a sa child could get 2 years in prison. His education will be stuffed, it'll cost a fortune for tax payers and his career prospects are dead and buried. I struggle to see how a month in a hard labour camp with a couple of harsh beatings/lashings is less humane.

And that just teaches the kid that there are no consequences. Dumb kids need to be punished. They need to be seen paying for the crime themselves. Their peers need to see that Jimmy in their class went to jail for a year because he was acting like a twit and caused some serious harm.

The next time someone calls with the exact same wording, and they don't respond appropriately.....you'll be calling for their heads to roll.Yes, I get that the police have too any toys they need to use. But wtf are they supposed to do? Send Officer Snuffy with a single bullet in his pocket every time?

It's not like they can't respond at all, they just need to avoid shooting the dog and blowing the house up until they see some evidence that something is actually going on. Stuff they really should be doing anyway.

the one time you don't react, someone will die and there will be a huge investigation and people being fired with no pension benefits

No one is saying "don't react", they are saying "react appropriately". You put together a well thought out response plan BEFORE the event, then follow it. Such a response plan should not call for busting down the doors with guns blazing on the strength of a single anonymous phone call. Not following the plan is what should result in disciplinary actions.

The reason you are only aware of those instances (and of course implying those are the first instances) is because you are a partisan hack.

FYI swatting has been used significantly longer that your partisan views ascribe. I a guy that someone tried to swat (the community didn't have a swat) in 1994 via modem redial on a BBS. Why don't you try climbing out of your partisan cave? There is nothing more disgusting than anyone trying to claim (or imply in this case) that persecution makes them right or virtuous in their cause.

It certainly dates back to the 1960's, when faking bomb threats from peaceful protesters was used to bring in police and National Guard against them. The Scientologists made an art form of it. Mary Sue Hubbard, L. Ron's wife was convicted for her involvement in "dead agenting" Paulette Cooper, which included faked bomb threats against the Israeli embassy, in order to discredit Paulette's book called "The Scandal of Scientology". And who can forget "The Maine", whose faked fraudulently advertised bomb destruction in 1898 was a vital trigger of the Spanish-American War?

Discrediting your opponents by making fraudulent bomb threats is an old, old political hobby.

And who can forget "The Maine", whose faked fraudulently advertised bomb destruction in 1898 was a vital trigger of the Spanish-American War?

The Cuban government promoted that conspiracy theory, but there's no evidence for it at all. It was most likely an accident, which happened pretty often in the late 19th century, before modern safety standards. Tensions with Spain were already so high, and war was already imminent. "it was cited by some hawks already inclined to go to war with Spain"

WWII?, the same thing happened during the french revolution when the Monarchy blamed anarchist for any number of actions their own soldiers commited. This isn't a game of trying to find the first incident, it's probably been happening since og claimed ug shat on the food so he could steal his new cool invention the wheel.

That's only because you didn't live in New York City, where false fire alarms and sending police to someone else's house for a "domestic" call were considered entertainment in certain quarters back in the day. Admittedly, they were less likely to show up with military weapons then.

All behavior is learned... just not necessarily from a person's parents.

If you don't think behavior is learned, guess what happens to babies who aren't given any stimulation whatsoever beyond being fed and kept only as clean as necessity may dictate?

And for what it's worth, some psycho actually did such an experiment in Europe a few centuries ago.... and if I'm remembering correctly,, he wanted to discover what language babies would learn to speak if they weren't exposed to social interaction. The an

This is a very confusing claim. Much of what is learned is _mis_learned, misrecollected, and confused by faulty recall. The amount we are expected to learn is coupled with a powerful, but fundamentally plastic and malleable distributed storage system. Such a system will inevitably have errors from the original "lissons" provided.